To the editor:

I wrote recently to say that I’d been going about throughout this pandemic, unafraid of the virus and mostly unmasked. (I’m claustrophobic and wearing a mask is very anxiety-producing for me.)

I read a lot of medical literature not only because it fascinates me but also because 50% of my immediate family have been victims of medical error, including my mom and my surgeon dad at the end of their lives. I survived my own experience. However, I mistakenly thought for many years that I had had an allergic reaction to a drug, which landed me (my one and only time) in an ER—until I told the story in front of my cousin’s wife, a retired Canadian GP, and was finally set straight. She immediately exclaimed: “Oh, no! That doctor missed a lecture on Demerol. Given what you had going on, you should never have been given that drug.”

I equate vaccine injuries with the drug-induced catastrophe that contributed to my mom’s death at the age of 66. One of the coronavirus vaccine injuries enumerated and described in Dr. Patricia Lee’s letter to the CDC and the FDA (made public by Aaron Siri’s law firm) reminded me instantly of my mom’s demise. Due to what I’ve witnessed and experienced, I am unable to dismiss or deny vaccine injuries, or view victims as disposable. Each victim is someone’s mother, father, child, sibling. Drug adverse events or interactions can change someone’s life, sometimes irrevocably, in an instant.

I read incessantly and enjoy doing research. I’ve probably spent more than 1,300 hours over the last 2 years reading articles, scientific papers, and watching videos pertaining to this pandemic (2-3 hours each morning). I’m certain that not only was this virus fabricated, and it could very easily have been done in this country in Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, NC, but much of the narrative has been, as well. 

I knew at the beginning of the pandemic, from PBS darling Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s tiny book The Laws of Medicine, that any medical test can be as much as 95% inaccurate, depending on the population tested and the disease prevalence rate within that population. Widespread testing of asymptomatic people therefore, seemed like a ludicrous recipe for huge numbers of false-positive test results. (Dr. Mukherjee’s voice has been, quite oddly, largely missing from the pandemic conversation.)

One of the things I learned early on is that the ‘gold standard’ PCR test cannot detect either active virus or active infection. Words to such effect can usually be found as a caveat in any scientific study, which relies solely upon the PCR test, making the conclusions drawn by such a study questionable. Therefore, I was in complete disbelief that a global pandemic narrative could be built upon its back. I also learned that there are many other issues with the PCR test. A long list of things called PCR inhibitors can affect the outcome of the test. It’s a very complex test that can be easily contaminated. The cycle threshold is an issue, in terms of using the test for diagnosis, which leads to the inventor of the technique Kary Mullis, who expressed horror that it was used to label people as HIV-positive. For him, it was a lab technique; it did not qualify as a diagnostic test. A perfectly good analogy of the PCR test would be if you took a tire and a rearview mirror to your local garage and got an inspection sticker! A couple of car parts do not equal a drivable car.

What happens if someone has a false-positive test result? The mind-body connection is very powerful. The opposite of the placebo effect, the bane of pharmaceutical companies, is the nocebo effect, and it’s powerful enough to kill people. I read a fascinating story by a respiratory therapist early on in the pandemic. Back in the 1980’s, he had seen many people come down with pneumonia about a month after getting a positive result on an HIV antibody test. These people would panic and within a month they would have pneumonia, all because they had forgotten how to breathe properly. The therapist remarked that after a month of fear and anxiety, the whole chest musculature was affected. It became a vicious circle that was difficult to break. He was brought in to teach these patients how to breathe properly again.

The journal Frontiers in Psychology published an article entitled “How Do Nocebo Phenomena Provide a Theoretical Framework for the COVID-19 Pandemic?” The authors write: “stress associated with negative expectations, which can be a fertile substrate for the onset of a nocebo effect, can produce significant physiological changes in the human body, including sleep disorders, respiratory complications, circulatory stress, digestive disorders, muscle tension, and pain (Liu et al., 2020).” And: “During COVID-19, a possible nocebo response may be induced on a large scale due to negative information received from the media.”

I urge everyone to stop paying attention to and absorbing the mainstream media’s incessant pandemic fear mongering. Especially now, after we’ve all experienced 2 years of it. It is actually disease-promoting. And if they are reducing complex issues to one and two-word memes it is usually in no way informative. It is a sophisticated form of marketing. 

I also urge all doctors to remember that just about everything in their toolkits can be deadly.

I think that a more important event in the history of medicine was not the development of vaccines, but the teaching of Dr. William Osler during the early part of the 20th century. He urged doctors to stop poisoning their patients and all people to restrain from poisoning themselves.

I was extraordinarily grateful to the Brigham in Boston, back in 1995, when they performed an autopsy on my dad, and then admitted to us that they misdiagnosed him. It’s very hard to remain angry when there’s honesty. Honesty and openness are usually healing.

By Jacqueline Brook,

Putney